


Disaster Button

by liliwick_the_WORD



Category: Common Law, Supernatural
Genre: Bickering, Case Fic, Common Law/Supernatural Crossover, Gen, Gen - Relationship - Freeform, M/M, Pre-Slash, Therapy Group - Freeform, Travis and Wes are lovable idiots, discontinued, minor crossover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-13
Updated: 2013-05-16
Packaged: 2017-12-11 17:22:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/801214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liliwick_the_WORD/pseuds/liliwick_the_WORD
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Remember the footage we watched?” Wes said quietly, as if they were sharing secrets and were afraid someone might be listening, and Travis nodded in return. “His eyes?” Wes continued. “The way they glowed, it seemed...I don’t know-”</p><p>“Supernatural?” Travis suggested.</p><p>[Minor SPN crossover, Case-Fic.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Discovered this lovely little fandom oh too late. Travis and Wes make me laugh for being idiots and make me cry because we can't see more of them. Decided to contribute by writing this.
> 
> Title borrowed from Snow Patrol's "Disaster Button".

_“Almost always it is the fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror.”_

**\-- Antonio Porchia**

* * *

 

In all his years in the police task force, Captain Mike Sutton had never come across two people who could be so infuriatingly _insensitive_ as to not take a tragic suicide case as seriously as they should do. This was not because said individuals were generally unsympathetic and uncaring about the public since that would sort of defeat the purpose of them being the police and all. No, it was because Travis and Wes were too busy bickering about who had left a sandwich that had gone off days ago in the back seat of Wes’s car.

“That sandwich is _yours_ , Travis. Admit it, it _is_ yours and because it _is,_ you are never eating in my car ever again.”

“No, I don’t eat pickles and that sandwich had pickles in it so it can’t be me. Therefore it’s gotta be yours so how about _you_ stop blaming me for everything, eh Wesley?”

“Don’t call me that and - god, why won’t you admit it? You know I never leave food in my car and who else rides in the passenger seat with me every day? You, Travis. So it’s yours. End of story.”

“Why don’t you two just shut up,” Sutton interrupted, slamming the case file onto Wes’s desk, the impact knocking the pen holder over and spilling an array of pens and meticulously sharpened pencils all over the otherwise neat desk. Sutton might have heard Wes let out a small squawk of displeasure at the newly-made mess he’d made but decided to ignore it. “Now did you hear what I said before you interrupted me with your discussion about a goddamn sandwich? A case for you two, so either you take it or not.”

“It wasn’t just any sandwich,” Travis pointed out innocently but the grin that was threatening to break out of his face aimed at riling their usually calm police chief up turned down that assumption. “It was a sandwich that went bad in Wes’s otherwise squeaky-clean, hygienic car.”

“Oh, so you admit that I keep my car clean,” Wes remarked, taking the opportunity to use Travis’s words against him. At the same time, he had already begun picking up the fallen pens and pencils scattered all over his desk and putting them back into the pen holder one-by-one. “You know how careful I am about eating in the car and you know why? It’s because I do _not_ eat in my car at _all_ so that sandwich could _not_ have been mine. Besides if I did buy food, I don’t toss it into my back seat and forget about it. Unlike _you_ , remember? That taco you ate in that squad car on the way to West Hollywood?”

“That was _one_ time!”

“Marks, Mitchell, I swear to _god_. Not today of all days, _please,_ ” Sutton hissed exasperatedly as he massaged his temples with his fingers, his face was reddening with the impatience he was trying to suppress. Usually he was very good at keeping his temper in check thanks to years of therapy and a lot of routine meditation every day but today he was held up in traffic for nearly two hours and the coffee machine in the break room had broken because somebody thought it was funny to put in a whole bag of coffee beans and grind it, paper bag and all. Now he was forced to look forward to a day with no coffee, lots of hours of listening to his white noise record to keep him sane, and any opportunities to keep Wes and Travis out of his sight and hearing until the day was out and he could go back to being in a state of Zen again.

Wes and Travis saw the warning signs in the form of a vein throbbing visibly on Sutton’s temple and decided to quit screwing around and make it up to him by paying attention.

“You were mentioning a suicide?” Wes said seriously, sitting straight and appearing attentive to the captain’s subsequent words. Out of habit, he reached out to rearrange the position of his now-filled pen holder so that it was parallel to the small stack of post-it notes that were placed in front of it. “I’m assuming this suicide is connected to a robbery, right?”

“Of course it is, Detective Genius,” Travis quipped as he folded his arms behind his head and leaned back against his chair, his eyebrow cocked at his partner. “Suicide ain’t our forte. Unless it _isn’t_ a suicide and if that’s the case, it’s called homicide, which _then_ becomes our forte.”

“Shut up, Travis,” Wes shot back without looking at him.

“ _Anyway,”_ Sutton cut in because trying to hold back his frustration was causing a migraine to emerge and all he wanted right now was for Marks and Mitchell to get out of his sight and chase some bad guys like the detectives they were and not the bratty five-year-olds they acted as now. “Victim’s a lawyer. Not much of a hot-shot but very well-off. Neighbour found his apartment door open and several things taken. Also freaked out when she discovered the body in the bathroom. Gunshot to the head and weapon in his hand.”

“Sure the thief didn’t do it?” Wes asked Sutton as he thoughtfully rubbed his chin.

“The body was at least two days old,” came the captain’s reply. “The robbery occurred just a couple of hours ago.”

“Not a nice way to go,” Travis commented, his face cringing. “Imagine having to stand in front of the bathroom mirror and watching yourself blow your own brains out.”

Wes opened his mouth to point something out to Travis but decided against it and opted for eye-rolling instead.

Sutton ignored them both.

“Either you take this case or not,” he said snappily, pushing the file to Wes. “Cagney and Lacey got their hands full in dealing with another suicide-robbery that happened two weeks ago. Yes, I know what you’re thinking,” he said when Travis and Wes both perked up in their seats simultaneously, like a pair of dogs who sensed the presence of a squirrel nearby. “The thief might be the same guy from this last incident but nothing’s certain until you two get down to the crime scene and look for clues.”

“Of course we’ll take the case,” Travis said, grinning. He reached over to snatch the case file from under Wes’s fingers, earning him a glare from said partner, and began to flip through its contents, “Wouldn’t dream of not helping out Cagney and Lacey if it turns out that these two crimes are connected. Just a normal suicide-robbery case like all the others. We might even catch our perp before them.”

Without taking his eyes off the file, Travis raised a fist to Wes, who automatically bumped it with his own.

Sutton sighed exasperatedly and made to leave their desks to take shelter in the sanctuary of his office, intending to listen to the sound of twittering birds for at least an hour or so before he thought about coming out again. “This isn’t a competition, you two,” he told them over his shoulder when he reached the door of his office. “And don’t take these suicide cases lightly. Whoever it is who’s swiping from these dead bodies has to stop.”

“Absolutely, Cap,” Travis agreed with a salute, getting up and shrugging on his jacket and leaning over to pick up the chocolate bar he bought from the vending machine near his trailer on the way to work this morning. Once in his hand, the chocolate bar was snatched out of his grasp, leaving his palm empty. Travis lifted his head and fixed his stare on Wes.

“What are you doing?” he said quietly.

“We talked about this,” Wes simply said, waving the chocolate bar from side to side before he pulled out one of his desk drawers and tossed it inside. He shut the drawer with a sharp snap. “You are not allowed to eat in my car.”

“I am _not_ going to eat that in your car,” Travis countered, trying to keep his voice levelled and was impressed that it sounded steady and not bordering on hysterics right now. If there was one thing that Travis did not like, that was when food was forcefully and cruelly taken away from him. Especially if the person who was doing it was Wes. “I’m only keeping it in my pocket so I can eat it outside later.”

“Nevertheless, I don’t trust you with food and you’re just going to eat it in my car in secret anyway,” Wes said, glaring back at him as he buttoned the jacket of his suit and tucked his chair neatly under the desk. Travis noticed that one of Wes’s hands had wandered back to the desk drawer to firmly keep it shut.

“Wes,” Travis said, cautiously circling around the desk in the manner of approaching a fire-breathing dragon that was guarding its precious hoard. “Give me back my chocolate.”

“No,” Wes replied stubbornly, his knuckles whitening as he pressed his palm harder over the drawer.

“ _Wes_.”

“Travis, _no._ ”

“Wes, you’re overreacting.”

“Nice try but no. This stays here. Either the chocolate stays or _you’re_ not riding in the car with me.”

“What the hell? You’re seriously banning me from your car because I’m going to carry around some chocolate? Did you hear what I said to you just now? I’m only carrying chocolate. Not eating it at all. Seriously man, you are overreacting!”

“And you are not riding in the car with me!”

The door of Sutton’s office suddenly banged open with a thud, startling them both. They hadn’t realised that their banter had risen in volume to the level of shouting and they were quickly becoming aware of the fact that the rest of the police staff were now staring at them. By the captain’s office door, Sutton’s entire face had turned tomato-red as he stared them down.

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TWO STILL DOING HERE?” he roared at their stunned faces. “GET OUT!”

For once, Travis and Wes reached a mutual agreement and fled the room.

 

* * *

 

“I bet you our guy killed himself in front of his bathroom mirror,” Travis suggested once they parked in front of the high-rise block of flats swarming with police vehicles and got out of Wes’s car. “That would mean his neighbour must have found him by the sink, where the mirror is at.”

“This is ridiculous,” remarked Wes as they passed through the double doors into a lobby to find a couple of policemen telling the shocked tenants who lived in the same building that there had been an accident and ushered them outside or back into their apartment rooms. “And when I mean ridiculous, I mean your suggestion that we should bet on the location where Stanley Suzack killed himself. I mean, how insensitive is that? This is a crime scene, Travis. Remember what Captain Sutton said? We shouldn’t be taking this lightly. Oh wait, no - _you_ shouldn’t be taking this lightly since _you_ were the one who suggested a bet. You can’t be playing around like this. A suicide is a suicide. It’s still a loss of life. Think about how we’re gonna break the news to his family, how upset they’re gonna be and you know that’s never our favourite part of the job. So right now, we need to be professional about this and we can do that by you taking this thing more seriously.”

However, once they stepped into an elevator shaft, Travis muttered, “Twenty bucks say he’s by the sink.”

Wes instantly replied, “You’re on” and pressed the floor button and they ascended to the thirteenth floor.

“Unlucky number,” murmured Travis, gesturing to the floor button in the elevator shaft and Wes answered him with silence.

Stanley Suzack, as it turned out, was indeed very well-off. His apartment was a beautiful one, with cream and pear-green walls, soft grey carpeting, modernistic furniture and floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city. It would have remained picturesque if it weren’t for the police officers and forensics who were teeming all over the place like busy bees, pausing to take photographs, search for fingerprints and catalogue evidence. One of the police officers by the entrance was someone Travis recognised as Missy, whom he once chatted with during a stake-out one night. She spotted them coming in and turned to make her way over to them. She was short and rather cute, blonde hair tied up in a bun and a button nose and her police uniform suited her petite figure. She had been carrying a pen and a small notebook in her hands which she stowed into her pocket as she approached them.

“Detectives,” she greeted when they flashed their LAPD badges at her. Her green eyes settled on Travis, “I think I remember you.”

“Oh yes, I’m sure you do,” said Travis, flashing his hundred-watt smile at her and Wes groaned, rolling his eyes at his partner’s flirting. “Detective Marks and my sidekick, Detective Mitchell,” Travis said smoothly, gesturing at them both with a hand.

“Partner, not sidekick,” muttered Wes beside him and as usual, Travis pretended not to have heard him.

“It’s Missy, right?” Travis went on and she nodded, beaming at him which only told him she was impressed that he remembered her name. “So, would you like to walk us through what happened here?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Missy, turning to lead them deeper into the room, past the uniforms hanging around and whipping out her notebook to read aloud her notes. “So, the victim’s name was Stanley Stephen Suzack, aged thirty-eight, an only child to his parents who were doctors. He was also married but had been living separately from his wife for three years. His occupation was as a corporate lawyer at a small firm called Hutchinson & Son. Not very well-known here, I’m afraid. Two days ago, he shot himself in the head, left no note, and his body wasn’t discovered until this morning. His neighbour, Annie Richardson, saw the door of his apartment hanging open and when she came in, she noticed that a number of things were taken from this room. She then noticed a smell coming from the bathroom and found Suzack there, in a pool of his own blood.”

“You mentioned Annie noticing that things were stolen from here,” Wes said, ignoring the knowing look Travis was throwing his way. No doubt he wanted to ask Missy where Suzack’s body was located.

“Let’s see here,” Missy began and she led them to one of the dark grey couches near the floor-to-ceiling windows and pointed to an open briefcase lying on one of the suede cushions. “We took a look through that and found his wallet and passport gone. His cell phone’s gone too. Not in the briefcase, on the body, anywhere. Any identification documents about him are missing. However, there was an airline ticket with his name travelling from New York to LA for the fourteenth of this month found underneath the carpet. I don’t know about you but the way it was stashed there, it was as if he was hiding it. His flight back was dated two days ago so he must have come back from this trip of his and decided it was time to end it all.”

“He took a plane here?” Wes said, whipping out his own little notebook, expensive and made from genuine moleskin, along with a pen - which he clicked for a few times - and began jotting down that detail for later. “Have you found a suitcase or any form of luggage?”

“Over there,” Missy pointed to a suitcase which looked as if it was thrown into a corner, its contents ransacked. Now, it was currently occupied by two or three police officers examining it, picking out this and that. “We haven’t found anything else yet.”

“What else?”

“Paintings and sculptures,” answered Missy, sweeping her gaze around the room. “Annie says Suzack had been an art enthusiast. He bought paintings and decorated the walls with them. He also had sculptures as well, lined them up on every surface. They were the first things she noticed were gone when she entered the place.”

“What about the body?” Travis piped up and even if the normal observer wouldn’t spot it, Wes knew Travis’s expressions well enough to guess that he was eager to find out whether he was right about the location of the suicide or not. “Can we take a look at the body?”

When they entered the bathroom, they found more forensics and Suzack’s corpse sprawled across the shiny marble tiled floor, blank eyes staring up at the ceiling and a bullet hole on his right temple that had leaked a pool of blood around his head like a bloody halo.

Despite this important piece of detail, for the two detectives who had arrived at the crime scene, the first thing they noticed about the body was that it was lying somewhere between the porcelain sink and the Jacuzzi.

“Aw, that’s not fair,” whined Travis because from this angle it was impossible to see whether Suzack had been facing the sink or the Jacuzzi when he died.

“What’s not fair?” asked Missy curiously.

“Nothing,” Wes quickly answered and nudged his partner to come with him. They made their way closer, slapping on identical pairs of gloves and crouched over the body. There was a gun lying next to Suzack’s right hand where it had fallen out of his grasp and Wes picked it up, immediately noticing the silencer attached to it.

“Looks like nobody heard the gunshot,” he murmured to himself, putting the gun down. “That would explain why no one came up here to check it out.”

“I’m guessing he _did_ kill himself in front of the bathroom mirror,” Travis pointed out emphatically, gesturing towards the broken bathroom mirror by the sink, and then held out a palm and wiggled his fingers at Wes. “Which means I win the bet.”

“Not now, Travis,” Wes hissed, pushing the open palm away and casting a furtive glance back at Missy who was deep in conversation with some of her fellow police officers who had come to look at the body. “Shut up and focus, will you. Okay, so what can we tell about this guy?”

“He’s rich,” was Travis’s curt reply as he poked at the dead man’s jacket.

“Great observation, Detective Obvious,” Wes stated sarcastically. “What else can you deduce about this man? The fact that he’s wearing a suit and that there’s the gun he used to shoot himself over there?”

“Geez, cool your beans, my son,” Travis said with a bark of laughter. He then stopped and cleared his throat when Wes’s glare maintained. “‘Cool your beans-’…Oh you know. Those are lines from a song? No? Anyway, I just wanted to point out to you that this guy looks really healthy for somebody who decided to go and blow his brains out.”

“Your point?”

“Come on, man,” said Travis, shaking his head slightly. He was still poking at parts of the corpse with his fingers and Wes batted his hand away because it was annoying him. “We’ve been to a few suicide cases. It’s always some druggy who swallowed one too many pills or someone who decided it’s a good idea to try their hand at flying off a building. You know, the standard cases. The vics all have that look, you see. That look that tells you that they’re done with everything. You could see it in the shadows under their eyes, for instance. Or their skin suddenly looking thin like paper or the deep stress lines in their wrinkles or whatever. The point is, you could just tell. But _this_ guy? He’s all pristine and clean and just _okay_ -looking, I can’t tell his reasons for wanting to end it all.”

“Wow,” said Wes flatly, pretending to be impressed. “That’s real insightful, Travis.” But his eyes wandered over Suzack’s pale face and he noticed that Travis had been right to some extent. Suzack did look rather healthy for someone with suicidal tendencies but it was his expression which made Wes involuntarily shudder. Suzack’s eyes were wide open and his face was twisted and frozen in an expression that looked close to being horrified, as if he had seen something so terrible before he pulled the trigger.

Beside him, Travis noticed Wes’s hesitation and commented, “It’s weird, right? This is the first time I’ve seen a face like that. Like he saw something he shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Wes agreed, lifting Suzack’s stiff arm to study his fingers and found the nails neatly trimmed and coated in a swab of clear nail polish. “Manicured and this looks like where his wristwatch must have been,” he pointed at the slight mark on the dead man’s wrist where there was a mismatch of skin tones. “Either he took it off and it’s somewhere in this apartment or our thief really did clean him out, not really bothering about the fact he’s stealing from a dead man. That’s disgusting.”

“You think everything is disgusting,” Travis commented.

“Shut up, Travis.”

“Shut up, Wes.”

“I will if you do.”

“How about you start first?”

“How about _you_?”

“Okay, people are _staring_ ,” Travis finally pointed out, having noticed the looks that were directed on them. He turned back to the body and felt around the pockets, pretending to look busy. “You know what?” he said to Wes. “Something doesn’t smell right with this guy.”

“That’s because you’re smelling a dead man,” Wes pointed out in a matter-of-factly tone.

“Wasn’t talking about that,” Travis murmured and went to lift Suzack’s left arm and noticed that there was something staining the dead man’s fingers. It was not blood as it wasn’t red in colour but black.

“Is that ink?” Travis asked, shoving the fingers under Wes’s nose and secretly preened himself on the fact that Wes was making a face while leaning away from the dead man’s hand.

“Looks like it,” Wes replied, regaining his composure so he could peer at the hand closer. He then lifted a finger to trace on the space between thumb and forefinger. “See this? Remember when Kate’s pen broke while she was writing and got ink stained all over her fingers? Exact same place right here. This is where Suzack held a pen when he wrote.”

“That would just mean that he’s left-handed,” Travis pointed out. “He shot himself in the head with his _right_ hand on the _right_ -side of his head.”

“Do you think that’s strange?” Wes asked and for once, the sarcasm and sharpness were absent from his voice. He sounded genuinely puzzled. “A handgun is a heavy thing to hold. Unless you had some experience shooting, chances are that you might miss if you shoot with your non-dominant hand, right? Especially if you were in a state of anxiety.”

“Well if _I_ was in his position, I’d feel better if I had the gun in my dominant hand,” said Travis as he dropped the arm, got up and turned towards the small group of police officers waiting for their verdict. “Um, Missy? Yeah, one question. Hypothetically, if you wanted to shoot yourself in the head, would you hold your gun in your right hand or your left?”

Missy’s blonde eyebrow quirked right up. It was cute and Travis made the mental note to definitely ask her out one of these days. “Oh that’s easy,” she said with a smile. “I’d hold it in my left.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Missy said with a snort and a smile that brought out the dimples in her cheeks. “Because I’m left-handed.”

“Did you know that Suzack was left-handed too?” Wes decided that watching Travis make Missy swoon on her feet should stop now. “I’m sure you noticed the gun and the bullet wound are all on the _right_ side?”

There was an embarrassed silence from the small party of police officers. Missy even had the decency to look a little guilty for missing that detail out.

“So what are you saying?” piped up one of the officers, a balding man in his late thirties, after that silence. “That this isn’t a suicide?”

“I’m not saying anything yet,” corrected Wes as he got up from his crouch and pulled one of his gloves off. “I’m only pointing out that some things don’t seem to make sense here.” He then stepped over the body and stood in front of the sink, where the bathroom mirror had been before it was shattered into pieces, littering glass shards all over the sink. There was a bullet hole that punched through the marble tile on the wall where the mirror once hung. He sensed Travis sidle up next to him.

“So, tell me that I’m right,” Travis was saying and if the mirror had still been there, Wes would have seen Travis grinning at his reflection. “That Suzack shot himself in front of the mirror, at this sink, and I win twenty dollars.”

“We don’t know that,” Wes countered with a frown, trying to ignore the increasingly plausible fact that the dead man had definitely shot himself by the sink. “He could have just shot the mirror and then wandered off to the Jacuzzi and shot himself there.”

“You wish,” Travis snickered, glancing at the floor and noticed something on the marble tiles. “Ooh,” he uttered, attracting Wes’s attention and he crouched down and ran his gloved finger over a black mark on the tile. “That’s a scuff mark. From those designer shoes of his. Right foot, I think. He was definitely standing there, probably with that gun in his hand.” He quickly snatched his finger back, narrowly missing getting stepped on by Wes’s foot, which he was placing over the scuff mark on the tile. “Why’d you do that for?” Travis whined, cradling his finger close to his chest as he peered up at his partner.

“Just testing something out,” Wes answered distractedly because he was on to something so Travis quickly straightened up to stand beside him.

“The bullet hole is there,” Wes began, pointing at the mark on the wall. “It’s on the left side of the mirror. The angle he fired shows that he held the gun with his left hand. So I’m here, facing the mirror, right? If I was suicidal and hated myself, I’d shoot at my reflection which should be right about _here_. So-”

“Why would he shoot over there?” Travis cut in and realisation dawned on him.

“Because he was shooting at _something_ over there,” Wes voiced their thoughts with a nod and turned his head to that direction and all he could see was the door of the bathroom leading out to the bedroom.

“You think someone came in and he saw their reflection?” Travis surmised, following Wes’s gaze. “It’s weird how he shot the mirror instead of turning around for the real thing.”

“He may have acted on impulse,” Wes proposed and there went that stupid chin-rubbing thing he did when he was thinking. “Like he saw something he didn’t expect, something he shouldn’t have, and just fired on impulse.”

“ _Oh,_ that could explain the freaky look on his face,” Travis said, glancing over his shoulder to look at Suzack’s frozen, horrified expression for good measure. “Man, you’d make a face like that too if you saw somethin’ freaky in the mirror. Like your own face, Wesley.”

“Wow, I’m dying from laughter. Your jokes are so funny, Travis,” Wes deadpanned and before he could continue his comeback with that, Missy stepped forward to interrupt them.

“Detectives?” she said, peering up at them. “Found anything new? Or found everything you need? Because I still need to tell you about the things that were stolen from this apartment.”

“Yeah, in a bit,” said Wes offhandedly. “This place has CCTV right? We think someone else was in here at the time of Suzack’s death. We also need to talk to the neighbour about what she saw. Could you do something useful instead of standing around and waiting for us to tell you what to do? Maybe call security or the neighbour or something?”

“Geez, Wes,” murmured Travis exasperatedly by his side when the poor, flustered Missy left the room to make a call. “Be nice to her.”

“I _was_ being nice to her,” Wes muttered back as they left the bathroom. “I was helping her become a better police officer by making her think on her feet. That’s being nice.”

“That is not the right way, bro,” Travis said disapprovingly, shaking his head.

“Don’t call me that.”

They found Annie Richardson next door, huddling in a sofa with a mug of hot tea in her hands and a shock blanket over her shoulders. Annie was a red-headed, curly-haired woman in her thirties whose face was smudged in tears and make-up and still wore her dress suit which had been wrinkled badly. She had abandoned her heels on the floor nearby and was wearing a pair of fluffy house slippers instead. The female officer who was in charge of looking after her got up from the sofa to greet the detectives who arrived.

“She’s still in shock,” she explained. “Couldn’t get a steady word out for about twenty minutes. She’s a little calmer now so you could go ahead and try to ask her your questions.”

When Wes and Travis introduced themselves to Annie who nodded at them nervously and watched as they settled down on the sofa covered in a faux fur throw, a large, fluffy tabby cat made itself known to them by climbing onto the sofa and curling itself onto Travis’s lap.

“Hello baby,” Travis cooed, scratching under the cat’s chin and it emitted a deep purr. “What’s your name?”

“That’s Alice,” Annie answered him with a small smile. “He’s just turned two last week.”

“Whoa, Alice’s a boy?” Travis’s eyes widened incredulously and Annie let out a little laugh, relieving some of the anxiety in her face.

“I named him that when he was still a kitten. I thought he was a girl at first so I called him Alice and it wasn’t until much later that I realised he _wasn’t_ a girl, but the name just stuck,” she explained, her voice steadying. She looked a little more relaxed and calmer now that Travis had asked about her cat. Travis just had that effect on people and Wes admitted that he was useful to be around at times.

“Can you tell us what happened?” Wes began, pen and notepad ready at hand to take notes. He clicked on his pen several times, ignoring Travis’s eye-rolling, before putting the tip on the pad and looking up.

Annie cleared her throat, adjusting her hold on her mug of tea. “I was about to go to work,” she began, her voice quivering just slightly. “That was around 6.20 this morning and it was still dark outside. I was running late so when I locked my door and was about to pass Mr. Suzack’s apartment, I noticed his door was ajar and it wasn’t locked, like he’d forgotten to close it. So I opened it and his night lights were on and I called out to him to check if he was in there and that’s when I noticed his paintings were gone.”

“What kind of paintings?” Wes asked, his hand busy jotting things down.

“Just normal kinds,” Annie answered. “Mostly abstract stuff. You know, colourful lines and dots. Oh and some sculptures of animals and people. He told me once that the paintings were precious to him but he never mentioned the artists.”

“Were you and Mr. Suzack close?”

A blush formed on Annie’s cheeks and she shyly looked down at her tea, “Actually no. He was very distant and always kept to himself. I’ve only been in his apartment twice in the three years that I’d known him. We sometimes greet on the way to work. Um, I did invite him in for some coffee one time but he couldn’t come back anymore because it turned out he was allergic to cats…” her words trailed off when her eyes began to water. “Oh, I can’t believe Mr. Suzack would do something like that,” she gasped and reached over to snatch a tissue and bury her face in it.

“I know it’s hard for you,” Travis said gently to her. “But could you please tell us what happened next when you noticed the paintings were gone?”

Annie bobbed her head in compliance and after wiping her eyes and smudging her mascara further, she took a deep breath and spoke, “When I noticed the missing paintings and sculptures, I thought at first Mr. Suzack might have sold them or given them away. I didn’t know why but for some reason I stayed in the room a little longer because I had a feeling that Mr. Suzack was still around. So-so I went into the bedroom a-and I know I shouldn’t have. But I was just looking around and I smelled something awful in the bathroom. So I went in and clicked on the light and…” she gave a sharp sob and buried her face into her tissue again. Travis saw Wes’s jaw clench impatiently as they waited for their witness to calm down and continue the rest of her story.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Travis said solemnly. “It must have been terrible for you.”

“So did you call 911 after that?” Wes interjected curtly and Travis shot him a glare for his indifferent manner.

“N-no not yet,” sobbed Annie as she emerged from her tissue. “I stumbled out of the bathroom a-and I was having a hard time not to throw up actually and then…” She paused for a moment and then looked up at them, her gaze suddenly focused. “I-I’m not sure how but I sensed someone was there so I turned and I thought- no I s-saw someone - a _person_ looking at me through the window. It was still dark outside but the sun was about to come out so there was enough light to make out there was definitely something out there. But when I stared a little longer, there was just a pigeon sitting on the windowsill. Whoever was watching me outside was gone.” Annie let out a heavy exhale, “Please don’t think I’m crazy, Detectives, but I was _sure_ for a second there that the thing staring at me through the bedroom window was a man and not a pigeon. And the strange thing was that he looked a lot like Mr. Suzack.”

She paused to take a long sip from her tea before facing the detectives who were currently exchanging looks at one another. Noticing this, her face fell slightly and Travis was quick enough to catch her dejected expression.

“It’s not that we don’t believe you, Annie,” he reassured her sincerely. “It’s possible that whoever it was you saw out there could be the guy who stole those paintings.”

To their surprise, Annie was shaking her head firmly. “I know what I saw,” she insisted. “I can recognise Mr. Suzack anywhere, down to his suit and his hair and his face. The man outside that window looked a _lot_ like him.”

“Are you sure about this?” Wes asked, his best interrogating tone evident in his voice.

“Yes sir,” Annie replied and took another tissue to blow her nose.

A little while later, Wes and Travis were invited into a little room filled with TV screens which was situated at the lobby downstairs. The security guard in charge of the room was a tall, wiry elderly man in his sixties with a silver goatee and bright blue eyes. He was called Stanley as well and had decorated the room with miniature figurines of Chinese lucky cats.

“These little critters keep me company at night,” he was saying in a croaky sort of voice, gesturing towards the little statues scattered over his desk and windowsill. He picked one of them up, “This one here’s my favourite. I call her Ming-Zhu. Got her about a decade ago and she gave me a lot of luck when it came to bingo.”

“Seriously?” Travis said, grinning. “Do you think I could borrow her for tonight’s lottery numbers? I promise to take care of her and give her back to you right afterwards.”

“Oho, I’m sorry Detective, but Ming-Zhu stays with me,” Stanley replied with a good-hearted chuckle and carefully placed the porcelain cat back on the desk.

“That’s cute,” Wes said unsmilingly and went to sit down on one of the chairs in front of the TV screens. “Did you know Mr. Suzack very well?” he asked, leaning back to the headrest and lacing his fingers together.

“Not much,” replied Stanley with a shrug that seemed to rattle his entire being. “Keeps mostly to himself. He goes to work every morning at six on the dot where a car comes to pick him up and he comes back here just after midnight.”

“Does he get a lot of people over?” Travis asked, absent-mindedly running his fingers over the cat figurines on the desk he was sitting on. “You know, like a lady friend?”

“Oh nothing like that,” answered Stanley with a shake of his head. “He seems to be a workaholic, all about keeping up appearances. Sometimes he stays nights at that law firm of his but that only happens about once or twice every month. He gets his groceries delivered to him on his door. Let’s see, what else? Hm, Annie from 13B likes him. I keep telling the old girl she should go for it but she’s much too shy to do anything other than stare at him from afar.”

“Yeah, we noticed,” nodded Wes in a bored tone and, because he felt up to it, sharply flicked Travis’s fingers off the cat figurines he was caressing and the latter let out a yelp. Travis then tried to do the same to Wes as well but the other was quicker, pulling his hand away. “Anyway, yeah so we’d like to look through the security tapes from two days ago, around about the time Suzack returned back to his apartment.”

Five minutes later, the three individuals quietly watched the desired footage on one of the screens. At 11.45pm, Stanley Suzack, dressed in a smart suit under a long thick coat and looking a little harried, rushed through the dimly lit lobby, managing a quick nod at the security guard by the front desk before disappearing beyond another set of doors leading to the elevators. About fifteen minutes passed and midnight rolled by before the security guard suddenly got up from his chair, pulling out a box of cigarettes and exited the building. It was not long before a man entered the lobby and there was no mistaking the suit and coat. It was Stanley Suzack coming into the building for a second time. His entrance was not rushed for he was strolling calmly through the hall instead, one hand in his pocket while the other carried a briefcase.

“I don’t believe it,” Travis breathed, voicing out everyone’s shock, and reached out to rewind the footage again. “That’s definitely Suzack.”

“When did he go outside?” Wes said, glancing up at Stanley the shocked security guard who stood beside them. “Is there a back door or a fire escape he could have used to get back outside without passing the lobby?”

“Well, yes there is,” nodded Stanley, mouth still gaping and eyes glued to the screen. “But all the fire escape doors are alarmed. Anybody who uses them when there isn’t an emergency will set them off. I don’t think it’s possible that the alarms were dysfunctional that night. We carry out weekly drills after all.”

“He’s an only child,” Wes recalled back Missy’s words about Suzack’s family background and shook his head as if confirming it to himself. “So he can’t have any siblings and therefore, no twin brother. So how-”

“Wes, Wes,” Travis suddenly called, tugging roughly on Wes’s sleeve and with a quick jerk and a fixed glare that went unnoticed by Travis, Wes turned his attention back to the screen, “What is it?”

“Is there something weird about Suzack in this shot?” Travis asked, his blue eyes unblinking. He was playing around with the play-rewind button, watching the scene where Suzack entered the building the second time, right after the security guard left his post at 12.06am.

“Is it the fact that he chose to come in _after_ the security guy went out to have a smoke?” Wes tried to answer as a matter-of-factly but it only came out sarcastic as always.

“No, idiot,” Travis snapped impatiently and when Wes was about to comeback to that insult - because if there was an idiot in this partnership, it was Travis and not him - Travis was tapping on the screen with a finger and saying, “Look at his eyes. Just watch this shot and look at his eyes.”

They fell into silence as Travis pressed rewind and played the footage again. Wes watched Suzack’s eyes carefully this time and noticed with a shock that there was a strange light glowing out of them. It strongly reminded him of the way animal eyes glowed in the dark when a video camera recorded their nocturnal activities for a wildlife programme. He let in a sharp intake.

“It could be a trick of the light?” Wes proposed.

“I don’t think so,” Travis said, shaking his head lightly and pressed Pause so that the footage of Stanley Suzack with his glowing eyes froze on the screen. “That weird light thing doesn’t go away. There could be something wrong with the security camera but everyone else’s eyes are fine before and after this. Only Suzack’s are weird. And get this: the first footage of Suzack coming in minutes ago was normal. No freaky glow-in-the-dark eyes.”

“Does that mean that _this_ Suzack is… _not_ Suzack at all?” Wes said, incredulity in his tone. “Or maybe there’s…two of them?”

“Ah,” Travis said, brandishing a finger in the air. “That would explain how Annie ended up thinking she saw two of them in the apartment. Well, one of them was inside while the other guy was outside the window…”

“Hang on,” Wes said suddenly, swivelling his chair to face Travis and his eyes were bright with realisation and a grin was threatening to form on his lips. “Travis, this is the _guy_.”

“What are you talking about…” began Travis and then at Wes’s wide-eyed look, finally caught on to his partner’s thoughts. “Oh, you mean, _he_ is the guy? The guy Suzack saw in the mirror? The guy he was shooting at? That could explain that freaky face of his before he died.”

“Exactly,” Wes agreed, staring at the frozen footage of the man with the strange glowing eyes. “The question is, who or rather _what_ is he and what is his connection to Suzack’s suicide?”

As they continued to stare at the screen in a state of wonder and bewilderment, forgetting completely about Stanley who had pulled out his phone and was frantically typing a text message with an excited look in his eyes at their recent discovery, Travis frowned beside his partner, “You know, this is becoming a really weird case here, Wes. I thought we were supposed to be investigating a robbery which we _still_ haven’t yet asked about and now, we’re dealing with… whatever this is.”

“We know one thing though,” said Wes, letting out a deep breath and meeting Travis’s eyes. “This is definitely not a normal suicide-robbery case after all.”


	2. Chapter 2

It was late morning two days after leaving Stanley Suzack’s apartment building and Travis came to the station late as usual to sit down and notice at first glance that Wes was carefully positioning his body away from him, his jaw clenched tightly as he angrily typed up a report on his laptop. When he refused to acknowledge or answer any of Travis’s remarks, the long silence that they fell into afterwards became increasingly uncomfortable.

“Okay, what did I do now?” Travis asked, slamming his laptop shut in exasperation and pushing it aside after nearly an hour of silence between their desks.

When Wes didn’t reply, Travis rested his elbows on his desk and fixed him an intense stare, hoping that his maintained gaze would break his partner into answering. The trick never worked before but he was relieved when it did make Wes shoot a brief glare at him from over his shoulder.

“Wes, I know you’re still sore that I won twenty bucks off you,” Travis said slowly, as if he was speaking to an eight-year-old child about the importance of fairness. “But we all have to move on sometimes. Besides, you have _tons_ of money to give away and I have tons of opportunities to win them off of you.”

When that didn’t work, Travis sighed wearily in defeat, “Okay, if I admit that the sandwich that had gone off in your car was mine even though it _wasn’t_ mine at all, will you stop with this silent tantrum thing you’re doing to me right now because it’s unbecoming and childish even for someone like you.”

Wes abruptly spun his chair around to face Travis, his expression of irritation still maintained on his facade. “You tattletale,” he simply gritted out with an emphatic bob of his head.

“What?” Travis blinked, not sure whether he should feel offended or start panicking for being accused of spilling secrets. Did he tell Alex about something Wes didn’t want her to know? Did he tell Dr. Ryan something Wes didn’t want her to know? Hell, did he tell the whole world something about Wes that he didn’t want them to know? And for the record, what was it that Travis had supposedly blabbered out anyway?

“Our extraordinary suicide-robbery case got out,” Wes finally decided to skip the song and dance and get straight to the point. “About Suzack seeming to be in two places at once? Seriously, Travis? I know this is a first for us to come across a case like this but you didn’t have to go around telling the whole world about what we found out.”

“But I didn’t go around telling the whole world about what we found out,” Travis countered hotly because Wes was looking at him with disappointment and Travis did not like getting accused for something he was sure he didn’t do.

Apparently, Wes did not believe him because he went back to his laptop and began typing something up. A moment later, he placed the laptop on Travis’s desk and spun his screen around so that Travis could look at it and see that Wes had opened a local news website. An article written about their suicide-robbery case was posted on the online newspaper with mentions of Annie’s testimony and the security camera footage of Suzack’s double entrance.

“Notice the bit where the writer mentions Suzack’s twin?” Wes said distastefully, watching Travis’s eyes sweep over the text on the screen. “Yes, that’s supposed to be kinda a secret and you had to spill that part out too. Now _anyone_ on the planet who comes across this article will know.”

“But I didn’t do it.”

“Oh, of _course_ you didn’t do it. Like you didn’t tell Marcia from Seattle about the Robert Kingsley case.”

“That’s because we’ve already closed that case ages ago.”

“That’s still police business that the public aren’t allowed to know.”

“Oh my god, Wes, we are _not_ going to have a fistfight over this just like the last time you accused me of spilling to the press,” Travis said, tearing his gaze away from the screen to look at his partner in the eye. “Look, I _swear_ to you, on my life, that I didn’t do it. I _swear_ and you have to believe me because you are my _partner_ and you have to trust me when I say that I didn’t.”

After a tense moment where Wes and Travis exchanged silent glares at each other across the desk, Wes decided that Travis’s unwavering gaze was convincing enough for his words and that maybe he was overreacting _just_ a bit so he reluctantly nodded in agreement.

“Fine, I believe you,” he said tersely and spun back to his desk without another word, taking the laptop with him. Once he was settled, he began to type on the keyboard in a normal and not angry manner, his face carefully blank to disguise his embarrassment.

“Apology accepted,” Travis replied sarcastically and turned back to checking out the profiles featured on a dating site on his laptop which he had been trying to do throughout his and Wes’s bout of silence.

About five minutes later, Wes spun back to face him. “I’ve been thinking about the Suzack case,” he was saying lightly, as if they hadn’t just been arguing minutes ago. “I have a feeling that the suicide may not be a suicide at all. At least, it isn’t as straightforward as it looks.”

Travis was watching him and was quickly catching up to the train of thoughts running through Wes’s mind because he stated, “You’re talking about Suzack shooting himself in the head with his right hand when he’d been shooting at the mirror with his left.”

“Yes, because there was somebody there with him,” said Wes, resting his arms on the table surface and leaning forward on Travis’s desk. “What if this person, whoever he was, wasn’t expecting Suzack to be back? The airline ticket stashed underneath the carpet must mean something at least. Suzack may have been trying to hide the fact that he’d arrived back in L.A.”

“Yeah, about that flight of his,” Travis pointed out, remembering Kendall’s report a day after their visit to the crime scene. “Kendall found no record of Suzack travelling _to_ New York. At least, judging by his credit card bill anyway. It’s possible that he could have travelled there by car or bus or something but we have no idea when he even _left_ for New York. Witnesses from his law firm claimed he’d been coming to work everyday. There were no trips outside of the state. He was pretty much stuck here since last month.”

“Yes but Kendall did mention that he was definitely present for his flight from New York, right?” Wes asked for a confirmation and got it in the form of a firm nod from Travis.

“Yeah, flight records and security cameras confirm it alright,” Travis said. “According to his ticket, his plane left New York around 2pm. Right about that same time, Suzack was also closing a deal at his law firm in L.A.” He then raised his gaze level to Wes’s, “I don’t know about you but this just confirms our theory about Suzack being in two places at once.”

“I think that’s exactly what it is,” Wes murmured with an emphatic finger.

“So which is which? Is the real guy the one coming back from New York or the one staying in L.A. all along?” Travis wondered aloud.

“Not sure,” admitted Wes with a wistful sigh. “Either way, one of them is dead. But I have a feeling that the one with the bullet in his head is the real man.”

“So then you think that Suzack’s lookalike could be his real killer?” Travis said, resting his chin on his palm thoughtfully. “How could you possibly be sure about that?”

“Travis, you mentioned about his face,” Wes reminded him in a tone that was quiet and pensive. “His expression before and after he died. The same one. That kind of expression… it’s genuine horror. Whoever stopped by his place was someone he wasn’t expecting at all. No, it was more than that. Maybe he saw something…something really _terrible._ Like someone who looked _exactly_ like him. So he took a shot but missed and then that other guy came over and took his gun, shot him there. Hence, the last expression on his face still remained the same the moment he was killed.”

“But the timing would have been wrong, no?” Travis pointed out, mirroring Wes’s stance by leaning his elbows on his desk as well, hands raised to gesture along with his next words. “If you assume that Suzack’s evil twin killed him, he would have moved really, _really_ fast from the door to where Suzack was standing and shoot him there with a gun to the head.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he did. Move really, really fast.”

“No human could do that.”

“Maybe…I don’t know.”

There was something else hidden in Wes’s words when he said them and Travis edged himself closer, leaning into Wes’s space and fixed him a coaxing stare in an attempt to get him to share his thoughts further.

“Remember the footage we watched?” Wes said quietly, as if they were sharing secrets and were afraid someone might be listening, and Travis nodded in return. “His eyes?” Wes continued. “The way they glowed, it seemed...I don’t know-”

“Supernatural?” Travis suggested.

“ _Un_ natural,” Wes corrected him, his stare hardening a little. “Out of the ordinary.”

Travis huffed. They were close enough that his warm breath brushed Wes’s cheek. It carried the fresh, pleasant scent of green tea mouthwash. “Boy, this case just gets weirder and weirder.”

“Well, we did admit this is a weird case after all,” Wes murmured, smiling half-heartedly but it was enough for Travis to return a fully-fledged grin back at him.

Their moment subsided when someone knocked sharply on Travis’s desk for attention and both detectives looked up simultaneously to find Kate, a fellow detective, patiently watching their exchange as she stood by their desks.

“Made up, have you?” she asked them pointedly, motioning at the lack of space between their faces and Wes and Travis quickly pulled away from one another, coughing and clearing their throats.

“How long have you been standing there?” Wes asked, unconsciously rubbing his cheek which was flushing pink at being caught off-guard.

“About a minute or so,” answered Kate coolly. “You both looked really into it, whatever it is you were talking about.” She then shifted in her stance, suddenly business-like. “Anyway, all of us noticed you guys weren’t talking for a bit but now that you’re both back in the game, you’re in luck. Remember that Parsons murder case about a month ago? You know the nasty one with the dentist drill. Yeah, we finally found your guy and his hideout from a tip-off. Nothing like a smash-and-grab to accompany your reconciliation.”

“Alright, a smash-and-grab,” hummed Travis approvingly, his wide grin returning to his lips. “I love chasing bad guys before lunch.” He then turned to Wes and the grin became mischievous, “How about I catch him first and you buy me lunch?”

“No, I’m not going to do that,” Wes replied nonchalantly. “Besides it’s _your_ turn to pay anyway and you know why? Because it’s Tuesday and Tuesdays are Travis-pays-for-lunch days.”

“We never agreed on that.”

“No, but you always buy lunch on Tuesdays anyway. Might as well make it official.”

“Fine, but I’ll pay for lunch _only_ if you catch our guy before me.”

“Deal.”

“You guys are idiots,” Kate muttered, shaking her head as she waved them off.

* * *

Fifty minutes later, they returned to the station, empty-handed and locked in another argument.

“I _cannot_ believe you,” Travis was saying.

“Look, I had to stop,” Wes countered hotly. “There were _children_ crossing the damn road. I could have hit any of them.”

“Gosh, sometimes I think I should do the driving.”

“You drive a _motorcycle._ You don’t have a license to drive a car.”

“Oh, but I _do_ have a license to drive a car.”

“Yes, but it expired six months ago.”

“Doesn’t matter. If I’d driven the car, I could’ve dodged those kids because I have _great_ driving skills and I would’ve caught our perp before he got away. But what happened instead? You stopped and let him get away.”

“You know, if you hadn’t been shouting in my ear at that traffic light, I could have thought of an alternative route to catch up to him.”

“Oh, you’re blaming me for what happened? This should be a milk-run for us, Wes. It’s supposed to be _easy._ ”

“I _know_ , okay!”

“Okay, alright, you two need to stop,” Kate wedged herself between the two detectives, who were both shouting at each other’s faces for their failure in arresting their perpetrator, and she pushed them away from one another. “I know this is an embarrassment for you both since you _are_ supposed to be the best detectives here but Sandra just mopped this floor ten minutes ago and you’ll make her unhappy if you two make another mess in here. Someday, we’re going to have to handcuff you both on opposite ends of the room to keep you from jumping at each other’s throats.”

When Wes and Travis continued to exchange heated glares, she realised something and sighed loudly, rolling her eyes, “Oh, who am I kidding? You’re still going to yell at each other from opposite ends of the room anyway.”

“It was Wes’s fault,” Travis grumbled. “He was the one driving.”

“Look,” Kate cut in before Wes could open his mouth to shout at Travis. “It doesn’t matter. You guys need to go anyway. Just try not to kill each other while you’re driving.”

“What do you mean we have to go?” Wes asked, tearing his glare from Travis to look down at her. His face was still red from the shouting.

“Therapy session, remember?” Kate reminded them with a raised eyebrow.

“We don’t have therapy on Tuesdays, Kate,” Travis said, this time pulling his gaze away from Wes to Kate.

“Oh, yes you do,” Kate replied insistently. “Last week, you were complaining about how you hate Wednesdays because something big always happens on those days and you really didn’t want all that topped off with two hours of therapy in the afternoon so Captain Sutton suggested you change your sessions to Tuesdays instead and you agreed. Remember?”

Wes tried to remember that conversation a week ago but he could only recall the memory of him flicking pens inconspicuously at Travis from underneath their desks because the latter had hidden his hand sanitizer again, all while Captain Sutton was speaking to them. He might have absent-mindedly said yes to whatever Sutton had thrown at them without knowing what it was that was being said.

Apparently, Travis remembered the incident too because he opened his mouth and said to Wes, “I had bruises on my knees because of you. Those pens _hurt._ ”

“Serves you right,” Wes replied coolly.

“Okay children,” Kate said, sighing and jerked her thumbs over her shoulders towards the door. “I think this is the part where you two just go.”

They ended up driving separately to the community centre and, in the typical Travis and Wes fashion, managed to make it into a race of who could get there first. Wes narrowly missed hitting a fire hydrant when he turned a corner and Travis ran over someone’s shopping bag when he chose to take a shortcut through an alleyway. In the end, it was Travis who arrived first, settling himself in his usual seat in the circle of couples and Wes arrived two minutes later, fuming and muttering under his breath.

“You did that on purpose,” he hissed as he threw himself down on his seat next to Travis.

“What are you talking about?” Travis said, raising a lazy eyebrow at him.

“You took up _two_ parking spaces with your stupid bike,” Wes elaborated, glaring darkly at him. “I had to find parking space at the back of the building.”

“I really don’t know what you mean,” Travis replied in a dismissive tone and turned away.

Wes’s eye twitched a little, which was something that didn’t happen often, and he was thinking of tackling Travis to the ground when Dr. Ryan spoke up, silencing the group.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” she was saying, beaming at each couple sitting around her. “And thank you so much for coming in today. You’ve been very considerate in agreeing to change our normal session times to Tuesday afternoons instead of Wednesday. I hope you all had a good week?” There was some enthusiastic nodding and some hand-holding between Dakota and Peter and Wes and Travis merely exchanged scowls at one another and looked away.

The session began with a follow-up on last week’s homework, which consisted of listing down habits one didn’t like their partner doing and wished they would cease from doing so. This followed along with the steps they took to try to solve the problems and disagreements between them. Dr. Ryan told them that this exercise provided each couple with the opportunity to address the foibles about each other and strive to sort them out through effective communication and understanding. Inevitably, the exercise entailed to the entire group having to share their lists and the solutions they came up with to each other to see if there was any improvement in their relationships.

Most of the couples read out lists with ordinary bad habits like ‘forgetting to take out the trash’ and ‘putting socks on the kitchen table’ which were easily solved by negotiation. However, when they got around to Wes and Travis, the two detectives admitted at first that they hadn’t done the homework because “we were too busy trying to stop a robbery from happening at the nearby bank”. In response to that, Dr. Ryan made them list out their bad habits off the top of their heads and provide solutions to handling them. It turned out that the listing-out was something they could do really well compared to thinking up solutions because by the time twenty minutes rolled by, they had fired off their 150th item on their mental lists of bad habits.

“Thank you for your input, gentlemen, but we should move on to this week’s exercise,” Dr. Ryan cut in with a clap of her hands, halting the two detectives from speaking further while the rest of the couples snickered quietly around them. “However,” she added, as if voicing an afterthought. “I’m not sure how you think the pace of Travis’s eating could be an item on your list of bad habits, Wes.”

“If he eats too fast, you will feel like hurling,” Wes explained in a deadpan voice but was satisfied he found some of the others grimacing at the mental image. “If he eats too slowly, you will feel like choking him to death with his own food.”

“My oldest son used to eat real slowly when he was a little kid,” piped up Gary Dumont in an effort to help solve their little problem by sharing a solution with them. “He gradually sped up when we started timing his meals.”

“That is a great idea,” Wes remarked with a little smirk, shooting a glance at Travis. “I could also start timing the amount of time it takes for you to stop talking when you get annoying. How about three minutes?”

At this, Travis turned to the rest of the circle, his expression carefully fixed into one used to induce pity from his listeners. “See what I have to work with sometimes?” he sighed, shaking his head slightly like he was the unluckiest man in the world. “When he’s in a bad mood, he likes to bully me.” However, he then looked at Wes with a smirk that was identical to the one the latter had been wearing moments before, “I was thinking I could time _you_ instead. Those lectures of yours get pretty long-winded at times. How’s three minutes sound to you?”

“Thank you again, detectives,” Dr. Ryan interjected before another argument could start between the two. “Like I said, we should press on and introduce our topic of this week: words of affirmation.”

She then paused, as if to let the words absorb into the couples’ minds before continuing, “What that means is the ability to express to your partner the words which affirm that no matter what happens between you two, you still want stay with them, support them should they require it and show that you love them especially when they need to feel loved the most. This often comes up in times of hardship and occasionally at random and ordinary moments when you both are doing something together. It’s also considered to be one of those special moments when you realise without a doubt just how much your partner means to you. So to start, I want you to discuss amongst yourselves a scenario - whether you’ve experienced it yourselves or heard or watched it from somewhere - which brings out a need to express these words of affirmation to one other. I will give you five minutes.”

As the couples bent closer to one another to discuss these possible scenarios, Travis turned his chair to face Wes, who sat still and unmoving as he idly twirled his mobile phone in his hand. “I think I just thought of one scenario,” he began hesitantly because when Dr. Ryan was elaborating on this week’s topic, a sudden memory hit him, one he thought he’d forgotten but realised it had been sitting there dormant in his mind for years, just waiting to be recalled at the right time. Next to him, Wes suddenly interrupted him with a click of his tongue.

“Okay, this is a waste of time,” he muttered to himself and Travis was used to comments like these from Wes since he pretty much says them every week in every therapy session they’ve gone to.

“ _Like_ I said,” Travis said, his tone much more firmly this time. “I can think of one scenario for this thing that we’re doing. So do you want to hear it? I think you know this, it’s sort of a funny one but I’m not sure if you want us to share it.”

“We should be out there, you know,” replied Wes instead as if he hadn’t heard whatever it was that Travis was saying as he finally turned his head to meet the other’s gaze. “Catching the perp who got away. Not in here talking about our feelings.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you were thinking about _that_ while Dr. Ryan was talking,” Travis said with a groan. “Anyway, Santana isn’t our concern right now-”

“ _Santonia,_ ” corrected Wes, his leg bobbing impatiently against the floor, eager for this session to end. “Our perp’s name is Santonia. He’s a murderer who shouldn’t be out there on the streets.”

“Whatever,” Travis said, slumping back in his seat and then after a brief pause and the occurrence of a sudden thought, he murmured contemplatively, “I wonder what made him think about killing his victim with a dentist drill…”

“It’s certainly a gruesome albeit creative way of killing someone,” Wes replied in a murmur as he crossed his arms and legs together and looked thoughtful. “It’s almost artistic how he did it to resemble that horror scene from _The Dentist_.”

“I’m not sure whether I should be worried about you thinking that killing somebody with a dentist drill could be considered _artistic_ ,” Travis pointed out with a shudder. “I think you need to watch better movies, bro.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Your five minutes are up,” Dr. Ryan announced to the circle. “Shall we share what we’ve been discussing? How about we start with Clyde and Rozelle?”

Clyde and Rozelle’s scenario was one they both watched from an old soap opera, in which one of the main couples of the show are going through a difficult time because the boyfriend has lost his job and he and his girlfriend, who had come from a rich family, are forced to move into a small, ratty apartment and endure all sorts of unpleasantries thrown at them. After a lot of fights and some emotional reconciliations, the girlfriend then promises the boyfriend that whatever happens, she won’t leave him because he had helped her so much when she was recovering from drug rehab a year before.

“She was telling her boyfriend these lines and they were very good lines too,” Rozelle was saying with a smile and then turned to Clyde. “Oh what was it again, honey?”

“It was something like ‘You never left me when I was in rehab, even when all my friends and family have left me and gone. Now, the time has come for me to do the same for you.’ Something like that anyway,” Clyde answered, smiling back at Rozelle.

“Excellent example,” said Dr. Ryan with an approving nod. “Often the best way of maintaining a lasting relationship is the amount of attention you give to your partner. In this story’s case, the boyfriend gives most of his attention to the wellbeing of this girl, supporting her in times which are hard. As Clyde and Rozelle pointed out, once they finally put aside their current situation and remind each other how far they’ve come through together, the girl repays the support that her boyfriend has given her by affirming a promise that she wants to remain loyal by his side just as he has done for her previously.”

“What was the name of this soap opera?” Travis chanced to ask before Dr. Ryan could address the next couple for their chosen scenario.

“ _Our amigo Pedro_ ,” Clyde answered. “Only ran for two years before it was cancelled.”

“They show full episodes on Youtube,” added Rozelle with a wink. “Keep an eye out for a character named Giselle. Cutest thing I’d ever seen.”

The other two couples told slightly different scenarios: Peter and Dakota recalled the time when they repeatedly recited their wedding vows to each other every day for a week after their wedding ceremony and then did it again for the first anniversary of their marriage life.

“I’m not sure why we don’t say them anymore,” Dakota said, sniffing back tears.

“Why don’t you say it to each other now?” suggested Dr. Ryan gently. “We would love to hear it.”

The couple then recited their vows, staring intensely into each other’s eyes and once they finished, Dakota was crying as she leaned over to kiss Peter. The rest of the circle of couples, save for Wes who had zoned out in the first few minutes of their discussion and went to staring blankly at the floor, were making awing noises and applauding Peter and Dakota for their effort.

“That was beautiful,” Rozelle gushed, and Peter and Dakota beamed at one another.

Gary and Grace Dumont, on the other hand, told the group about the time Grace’s sister was diagnosed with cancer and throughout the next three months, Grace was in a foul and depressing mood every day, pushing everyone she loved away. Gary had remained patient and understanding of her situation, quietly enduring her tantrums until the moment her sister died and she came out and apologised to him for her behaviour. He had told her that, “I can’t imagine what you felt when you were going through that hell but all I could do back then was to be there for you even when you pushed me away all the time. I love you, Grace, and I’d do anything for you even when you don’t want me to.” The Dumonts’ anecdote earned them a few tears from the rest of the circle, mostly from the women and Clyde, who was trying his best to hide his tears by leaning down and pretending to tie his shoelaces.

After dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and becoming composed almost instantly on the spot, Dr. Ryan turned the circle’s attention on their last couple. “Wes and Travis?” she addressed them, her steely gaze at the ready. “Can we please hear your scenario?”

Wes was prepared to give them something that he could make up in five seconds but Travis was already speaking for the both of them, a sheepish grin on his lips, “Yeah, I’ve got one. It’s not one I watched from a TV show or movie or whatever. It’s about us. And uh, it’s kind of a bit…embarrassing.”

The moment Travis mentioned the word “embarrassing”, Wes had all but snapped his attention on his partner. He stared at Travis, his mind racing over the possible scenarios that the latter was about to share with the group. Perhaps he meant the times when they were both in the line of fire, about to go into a shoot-out and one of them did something stupidly idiotic? He knew that in moments like these, they often affirmed to one another of the fact that they always got each other’s backs on the field because that’s what partners do.

“Don’t worry about being embarrassed,” Dr. Ryan reassured with a smile, oblivious of the fact that at the nervous tone in Travis’s voice, the other couples were leaning forward, eager to hear what he was about to reveal. “As I’ve explained before, this is a safe place to talk about anything and no one is going to judge you.”

There was a brief pause as Travis collected himself, glancing briefly at Wes who was just as curious as the others in what he was about to say, even though Wes felt that this wasn’t going to go how he was expecting. With Travis, he was never quite certain of anything anyway.

“It happened a long time ago, just after we solved our first case together,” Travis began with a little good-natured smile. “We got really wasted because we were celebrating our success and let me tell you, if we pulled through a good case and you happen to see Wes getting drunk, he is actually fun to be with. Yeah, so we were, uh, sort of walking home and it was, I dunno, almost five in the morning? I don’t remember how long we’ve been outside but yeah. We were pretty drunk and were walking like idiots and laughing like idiots and then Wes, he turns and says to me-”

“Wait, _when_ did this happen again?” Wes interrupted because he was trying hard to recall this incident and was internally scolding himself as it shouldn’t be that hard to do so. After all, they only got seriously drunk on a couple of occasions.

Travis looked at him strangely. “You _know_ ,” he said, eyebrows raised knowingly. “That case with the diamonds.”

“The Weiss-Ruben diamond robbery?” Wes asked, remembering that this was one of their earliest cases where he and Travis actually went out to celebrate their victory by getting seriously drunk for the first time, something that happened less and less as the years went by. “I _said_ something to you?”

The smile on Travis’s mouth stuttered a little before fading into an expression of surprise, “Yeah, you _did_. Don’t…don’t you remember?” A note of uncertainty had taken over Travis’s voice as Wes furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. When Travis’s eyes met his directly, the blueness in them suddenly seemed dimmed, as if dispirited.

“Wes,” Travis breathed. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember? You said that I was the best thing that ever happened to you, to happen in your life so far. You said that you’d finally felt...”

A heavy, still silence followed after Travis’s words trailed off and hung in the air above their heads and the rest of the group held in a collective breath, waiting for him to continue. Wes was frozen in his seat, his expression growing more baffled by the second even as an obvious blush slowly rose from his neck up to the rest of his face.

One of the men - probably Clyde - let out an uncomfortable cough and Dr. Ryan’s voice cut through the silence. “What did Wes say he felt?” she asked Travis, her voice quiet and coaxing.

At this, Travis turned and stared at her through unfocused eyes. He then shook his head, looked down and murmured almost distractedly, “No, nothing. He didn’t say anything else, just that.”

Dr. Ryan pursed her lips. She wasn’t buying that for a second.

Wes finally snapped out of his trance and looked away, scoffing and shuffling in his seat. “Sorry to disappoint you, Travis, but there is no way in hell I could have said that to you,” he said dismissingly, the blush still burning away on his cheeks.

“Do you remember this incident?” Dr. Ryan asked and she noticed that the other couples had leaned forward again, eager to hear Wes’s side of the story.

“No, I _don’t_ ,” Wes answered, a note of finality in his voice.

“And you expect us to believe that?”

“Of course I don’t,” said Wes nonchalantly but there was a biting mulishness in his voice. “But honestly? I really don’t remember that.”

It was then when Travis suddenly realised the awkwardness of this situation which he had unknowingly placed them in. He had assumed that Wes remembered the incident, agreed with him that it was an embarrassing one and probably didn’t feel like sharing it with anyone else because when they both became stupidly drunk, they were prone to say pretty much anything stupid, even though whatever stupid thing that came out of Wes’s mouth that night had made a huge impact on what Travis thought about their still-developing partnership then.

“But you did say it,” Travis piped up because he was the one who brought this up and he realised with a start that he actually wanted to get this through. He let out a half-hearted laugh at this while staring hard at Wes, trying to get him to look at him again because of course they should remember this since Travis did. He _did_ because no matter how awkward it was to address this after years of never once talking about it, Travis could not forget how he felt in that moment when they were staggering down the quiet streets, giggling like schoolgirls as dawn approached them from behind and Wes was grabbing him by his shoulders and staring at him with too-bright eyes and spoke words to him which had the power to make Travis’s heart soar wildly in his chest. Nobody in his life had uttered words like that before and it had been a shock to him, a delightful shock which ran through his being like accidentally burning your tongue from too-hot coffee and feeling pleasantly warm afterwards. In that moment, he understood what Wes was saying, shared whatever it was he was feeling. It was the moment when they realised they _clicked_.

“No, I _didn’t_ ,” Wes gritted out in denial, even though Travis was beginning to accept the possibility that Wes must have been too drunk to remember the events of that night.

“You _did,_ ” Travis said again, feeling a little disheartened. “Look, to save you from total embarrassment, I said the same thing to you too, okay?” Well, he didn’t really say the same thing and hell, it was actually much more embarrassing than Wes’s proclamation to him.

Wes’s head moved slightly so he was looking at him from the corner of his eye. He seemed uncertain and hesitant about what he was going to say next. “What is it?” Wes finally asked, curiosity in his tone. “What you said to me?”

The expectation in Wes’s gaze as well as everyone else’s made Travis let out a deep breath and he decided to break this anticipation by the formation of a cheeky grin. “No way in hell am I telling you that,” he said teasingly at Wes and the rest of the group. _Not now, not the time._

“What?” Wes said angrily and when Travis mimicked zipping his lips, locking it and throwing away the imaginary key, Wes looked like he wanted to kick him in the shin. Thankfully, he was saved from the possibility of pain when Dr. Ryan spoke, bringing the two detectives back to reality, to the circle of couples peering curiously at them, to the community centre hall in general.

“Travis, I imagine you don’t receive words like that very often,” she was saying, her eyes bright and calculating, a clear signal that she was onto something. “Tell us what you felt when you heard them coming from Wes’s mouth,” the steel that was cleverly concealed in her tone was warning them that she was not going to let this topic slide until they both submitted to the fact that they had to discuss this in a thorough manner.

Although he fared better when it came to sharing and caring time, Travis felt this was not the moment to do so; at least, not until he and Wes had a little talk about this. Before he could think of a reason to bail out, he was saved from answering when the double doors of the hall were pushed open to let in a group of college students carrying costumes and props in order to rehearse for their upcoming play.

“Oh, sorry,” said one of the intruding party, a skinny freckled young man in thick-lens glasses. “But it’s already three o’clock and we booked this hall?”

“Yes, of course,” Dr. Ryan sighed with an affirming nod to the students. She then turned back to address her therapy group. “We’re going to have to stop for now but for _homework_ ,” she paused in emphasis with a glance at the two uncomfortable detectives, who were gathering their jackets and carefully avoiding each other’s eyes. “I would like you all to think up more scenarios to share with each other on the next time we meet.”

Once she finished her words, both Wes and Travis shot out of their seats and were already halfway across the hall when Dr. Ryan’s voice called out from behind them, “Gentlemen, we _will_ continue this discussion so do prepare to share with the group once you two have sorted out the details of your scenario with one another. Alright, have a good week, everyone.”

* * *

Wes did not want to talk about that incident many years ago because honestly, he could not remember the details very clearly. Everything had been so hazy and he could vaguely recall laughing so hard that his chest hurt because Travis said something funny or stupid or both while he lined up their shot glasses in an immaculately straight line on the counter. He could barely recall the memory of them stumbling and bumping into each other as they wandered about the streets for hours, the gentle cool air of the early morning on their faces but apart from that, there was little else to remember. He couldn’t recall when exactly he might have said those words to Travis and _how_ he could have said them because they sounded so _unlike_ him, sounded like something Travis would say to any of the women he met and charmed under his spell. No, the only conclusion he could make out of this was that Travis had thought wrong. It probably wasn’t Wes who said those words to him but someone else, someone who _wasn’t_ Wes.

It was either that or the possibility that he was simply so stupidly drunk that he _did_ say something that he never would have said when sober and the memory of doing so had been wiped completely from his mind.

Either way, he really didn’t want to talk about it.

“ _Wes_ ,” Travis was calling his name for the third time after they settled back in their office chairs at the bullpen and began working on piecing together the evidence gathered from Suzack’s supposed suicide. “Stop ignoring me and acknowledge, will you? Even Hudson makes that whining noise whenever someone even mentions his name and that should be an embarrassment to you as a human being because Hudson is a _dog_ who knows how to acknowledge people when he is being referred to.”

“What is it?” Wes replied exasperatedly, making sure his tone sounded uninterested enough to tell Travis he didn’t want to hear whatever it is the latter wanted to say to him.

“Well, _firstly_ ,” Travis said, swivelling his chair from side to side. “I wanted to point out to you that you’ve been staring at that same page for the last half hour without moving. Also, I want to have a look at that file once you’re done with it.”

“Your input is appreciated,” Wes intoned flatly, flipping the file shut and then tossing it onto Travis’s desk. He turned back to his laptop, intending to look engaged in another important activity, like stalking Alex’s dating profile and sending threatening private messages to anyone who seemed remotely shady on her Admirers list.

“ _Secondly_ ,” Of course, Travis wasn’t done with him yet. “Do you honestly, _honestly_ not remember what you said back then?”

When Wes turned to look at him, he found himself being pinned down by Travis’s serious gaze. He sighed loudly, unconsciously shrugging his shoulders as if warding off the other’s stare. “No, I really don’t,” he answered simply. “In fact, I don’t even think I said it, Travis. It must have been someone else in your life.”

“No, there wasn’t,” Travis shot back and left those words hanging in the air, as if he had said too much on the matter. When the silence between them stretched into the borderline of awkwardness, Wes turned back to his laptop, intending to ignore him again.

“Look,” Travis murmured from his desk, sounding hesitant. “Do you want me to tell you the rest of what you said to me that night?”

“How about no?” drawled Wes, resting a cheek on his palm as he clicked his way through a couple of documents.

“Okay, why not?”

“ _Because_ , Travis, as I said before: I couldn’t have said them. In fact, I don’t say stuff like that. Not to you, not to anybody.” Wes huffed and then spoke in a quiet voice, “It’s the sad truth about me but it _is_ the truth.”

“How could you know that?” Travis’s voice took on a firm, somewhat impatient tone. “How could you if you said you barely remember this?”

When Wes didn’t answer, he could sense Travis’s quiet frustration all the way from the other man’s desk and after a deep puff of air, heard him say in an understanding tone, “Fine. You don’t want to talk about this now, that’s fine by me. But we _do_ need to discuss this sooner or later, and not because Dr. Ryan said so.”

They lapsed back into their individual work, examining the case files and occasionally exchanging them in silence once they didn’t need to refer to them anymore. Eventually, when Travis leaned over his desk to ask Wes if he could borrow a highlighter pen, that was when they fell back to their usual banter and it was as if their therapy session and the awkwardness of Travis bringing up a memory that Wes barely remembered had never happened.

* * *

The moment Travis sat down in his seat in the bullpen the next day and managed to greet Wes with a sleepy “Mornin’”, Sutton came over and ushered them both out. “Got a murder case for you two,” he quickly informed them. “The victim’s sister found her and called twenty minutes ago. Here’s the address, now go and make me proud, boys. Don’t kill each other on the way.”

As they sped down the highway, Travis was studying the little slip of paper scribbled with the address of the crime scene and let out a low whistle. “I think I know _this_ side of town,” he said with a grin. “Go to the centre and you get lots of bars and nightclubs, the really expensive kind that celebrities go to. My foster sister told me one time she spotted that Bieber kid sneaking in through the backdoor of one of them.”

“I don’t really want to know the details,” Wes muttered with a shake of his head. “Now stop being such a kid and just sit tight, take your stupid foot off my dash and stop trying to change radio stations for the fourth time already.”

“But _Wes_ ,” Travis put on his best ten-year-old boy impression, complete with lisp. It was actually rather impressive if Wes gave a care about it but he didn’t. “Wes, Wes. Are we there yet?”

They spent the next ten minutes bickering back and forth until they arrived at a wealthy suburban house with a porch and a lawn and a white-picket fence. Travis was staring at it in disbelief because it looked a lot like the sort of house Wes would live in if he ever got around to buying one. They strolled through the front door and passed a bunch of uniformed police officers, stopping one of them on the way to ask him where the victim’s body was.

“On the landing upstairs,” said the police officer and Wes could see that he had tattooed his own name, _Barry_ , on the inside of his wrist. Barry was a little on the plump side, with thick curly black hair and matching thick eyebrows. When he offered to take them upstairs, the trio began to make their way up a steep carpeted staircase.

“The victim’s a woman named Brenda Flowers,” said Barry as he huffed his way up each steep step. “Time of death was approximated around midnight or so last night. She’s divorced and currently lives on her own. She has a daughter who’d left to go to college. Brenda’s sister, Janet, came by this morning and found her about an hour ago. She was going to collect some things when she found Brenda lying dead on the floor upstairs. There was a kitchen knife nearby.”

“Murder weapon?” Travis asked, taking out a pair of gloves and pulling them on.

“Close but no cigar, Detectives,” answered Barry with a mysterious smile as they finally reached the landing to find more police officers roaming around. “Someone had broken her neck,” he revealed in a hushed, dramatic voice.

“Any signs of a forced entry?” Wes asked, choosing to ignore the manner in which Barry had delivered his last comment.

“We’ve checked all the doors and windows. Nobody forced their way in, meaning whoever killed Brenda was someone she _knew_ ,” Barry said emphatically, tapping his nose at them in a knowing manner and Wes and Travis exchanged looks.

“Very good,” said Wes with obvious sarcasm in his voice when he turned back to the portly police officer. “You could make a great detective someday.”

“Aw geez, you think?” Barry asked, looking flustered and delighted not to mention oblivious of the fact that Wes didn’t mean what he said. Travis felt sorry for the poor man so he shot Wes a disapproving look which the latter ignored.

They finally stopped in front of the body of Brenda Flowers, who was sprawled face down on the carpet with the clean kitchen knife found next her. There seemed to be no traces of blood anywhere.

“Whoa,” exclaimed Travis as he and Wes crouched over the body and peered at the face covered by her bushy brown hair. “She was hot, this Brenda Flowers. Why would anyone do something like this to her?”

“Murderers work in mysterious ways, Detective,” murmured Barry somewhere behind them in a tone of great wisdom and the two detectives rolled their eyes simultaneously and chose to ignore him.

Wes began examining the body in an effort to search for clues as to what happened. “Barry was right about what killed her. Someone snapped her neck in half,” Wes said, holding back a section of Brenda’s brown locks to reveal a small bruise mark on the back of her neck, where someone’s finger had put pressure on it. “Looks like someone with a strong grip. Someone who is able to do that with just one hand, it seems.”

“It looks like _that_ ’s the only place her killer made physical contact with her,” surmised Travis as he checked the rest of Brenda’s body to find no other traces of violence on it. He paused after he pried free one of Brenda’s arms, which was folded and tucked underneath her body, and stared at the woman’s fingernails. “Wes,” he called and showed his partner what he found. “Blood on her fingers.”

“Not from the knife,” Wes said and then looked at Travis. “We need to turn her over.”

With some help from Barry, who was buzzing around them like an inquisitive bee and looking eager to give them any form of assistance, they flipped Brenda’s body over to find some traces of blood on her collar.

“She wasn’t stabbed,” Travis reminded them and he knew what Wes was going to say next because they were both thinking the same thing.

“The blood is from her killer,” confirmed Wes with a nod. “She tried to defend herself. She had a kitchen knife in her hand but for some reason, she couldn’t use it so she used her nails instead. Wounded her attacker, hence the blood on her fingers.”

“We’ve got DNA, that’s fantastic,” said Travis with a grin and bumped his gloved fist against Wes’s unsuspecting one, which was hanging over a propped knee. “We can catch our guy in no time. Barry my man, have the coroners take the former Mrs. Flowers away for a full autopsy. Oh, we’re gonna need a bit of that blood sample for evidence.”

They hung around a little longer at the house, searching through the rooms in order to get a sense of who Brenda Flowers was before she died.

“She’s into yoga,” commented Wes when they searched through a mini-library and found an assortment of books and videos on self-help yoga.

“That would explain that fine figure of hers,” Travis commented into his ear. His head was hanging over Wes’s shoulder and realising this, the latter purposely knocked the sharp edge of that shoulder against Travis’s chin with a timed shrug. Wes realised his mistake when Travis howled in pain into his ear.

“I found a handbag,” Travis announced once they moved on to examine Brenda Flowers’s bedroom. He was waving an expensive branded bag around and then tossed it carelessly on the bed. “Can’t find her cell phone or any identification documents anywhere. She could’ve put those in another bag… and have you seen how many of them she _has_? Don’t get me started with the shoes, man.”

Wes frowned at Travis’s words, a nagging feeling of familiarity tugging at him because he thought he’d heard this story about their victims missing identification items before. He dismissed it when he happened to pull out a photograph of a younger Brenda whose arms were wrapped around a tall, handsome man dressed in military uniform. “Looks like this was her ex-husband,” Wes murmured, mentally noting that they needed to speak with him when they could.

Once they found everything they needed, they exited the room just in time to see Brenda’s body being carried downstairs, to be whisked into the back of the coroner’s van.

“Such a shame,” Travis said as he stared after her, making tutting noises and shaking his head. “I would’ve liked to get to know her a little bit more.”

“ _You_ have no shame at all, Travis,” Wes muttered with a sigh and began to walk to the direction of the bathroom in order to wash his hands before returning to his car. The intention was short-lived however when Travis suddenly spoke sharply to him, “Wes, _stop._ ”

“What?” Wes breathed; one leg poised in the air and he noticed that Travis was staring at something by his feet. He realised he was standing at the same place where Brenda’s body had lain and he warily looked down to find something small buried into the carpet by his shoe.

“What _is_ that?” Wes said and he and Travis crouched down to peer at the newfound object a little closer. When they couldn’t make anything of it, Travis reached down and gently pried it from the carpet’s fibres, holding it up to the light. The object between his fingers was flat and smooth but soft and spongy; it was also stained with dirt and dried blood. Nevertheless, Travis was quite familiar with the colour and texture of the object and he was sure that the shudder that ran up his spine expressed his growing horror at the realisation of what it was he was actually holding in his grasp.

“Wes,” he began, glancing up to meet his partner’s eyes and recognized from the other’s gaze that they were both thinking the exact same thing.

They had found a piece of human skin and the source of the blood on Brenda’s fingernails.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew, long note ahead:
> 
> I do hope this chapter made things a little more interesting. Adding the therapy group session scene had been fun for me (and it was hard one to write too) because I just adore writing about minor characters. I completely made up the session topic about "words of affirmation" because I just wanted a reason for the group to talk about (the possibilities of) Travis and Wes's shared pasts. I always wondered when it was that Wes and Travis decided/realised they worked so well together so I put that random little memory thing that only Travis remembered. (Goodness, what do you think Wes said to him?) 
> 
> One of the things I wrote here to show how Wes and Travis work so well is that they seem to know/catch up to each other's thoughts rather quickly. Overall, I think I portrayed their relationship in two ways: the first being that they bicker like an old married couple/"bratty 5-year-olds" as Sutton puts it and when they get into a fight and end up not talking to each other for a while, they suddenly become okay when one of them breaks their silence (also it is Such Fun to write their arguments because they can bicker about almost anything). 
> 
> I also portrayed another (possible) side of their relationship which is a subtler one, where they actually genuinely agree on things like theories about a case and they can become mellow and be almost soft to each other without knowing it and this escalates into moments which appear suspiciously intimate. Hence, I couldn't help writing a little teaser thing where Travis and Wes discuss Suzack's case over Travis's desk and while talking, they unconsciously lean in closer to each other, their voices becoming quiet. I've always wanted to write a scene like that with two characters who have a close enough relationship. I was glad I got to do that with Travis and Wes.
> 
> For you SPN fans, you probably can guess which monster-of-the-week this is. Fear not for our favourite brothers will make their appearance soon. I mean, how can they know about this case anyway? As Wes kindly reminds us, "Now anyone on the planet who comes across this article will know.” And yes, I made Travis say "supernatural" on purpose. Because I can.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed reading and do leave kudos/comments of what you think. I do favour a little feedback.


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